great thanks.
my other idea at debugging this was to get the old version of mt-daapd (without sqlite etc) that worked for me with xbmc and compare the data returned.
although i seem to remember that i couldnt manually get at the xml using the old version from apt (on debianslug) as xml support was only in the nightlies.
if there are any other ideas you’ve got on debugging this, i’d be happy to put some time into it.
bb